BUSH

“Black And White Rainbows” is an apt title for Gavin Rossdale and Bush’s latest album.

The current world and political climates as well as his highly publicized divorce from fellow artist Gwen Stefani, with whom he has three sons, certainly weighed on Rossdale as he was writing songs for Bush’s seventh studio album, which came out in March. But there’s optimism amidst its 15 songs as Rossdale finds “Mad Love” and a “Ray Of Light” even as he’s singing about “Dystopia” and “People At War.”

Most importantly the album — Bush’s second since Rossdale reactivated the group in 2010, after a seven-year hiatus — has put the band back on the road, where the hits such as “Everything Zen,” “Comedown,” “Glycerine” and more are rubbing musical elbows with Bush’s brand new material...

• Rossdale, 51, acknowledges that everything from Brexit to the U.S. presidential campaign factored into the songs he wrote for “Black And White Rainbows.” “I wanted to write a record about what it’s like coming out of a cannon before you take off through these watershed times,” he explains by phone from London. “I think it really is important to have the element of hope and repair and sunshine because it’s such a divided world now. It’s so divided and crazy and unstable and vulnerable. “It just feels like it’s in its very early stages, like a torrential downpour of confusion, and it’s hard to see where things are going to take shape,” he notes. “It’s like no one’s wearing a seat belt and there’s crazy tidal waves of stuff just coming at us. It’s fallen at my feet as a lyricist to consider the position that we’re in — and unfortunately chaos makes for really fertile ground to write from.”

Advertisement

• Rossdale did, however, purposely keep the tumult of his 2015 split from Stefani largely out of the mix on the album. “I didn’t choose those songs,” Rossdale says. “There’s a lot of songs that could be on the record. I did write for awhile before I began to think I had the right songs to release. It’s impossible to write and not have that in my brain; I’m an artist and my real life informs loads of it. But sometimes it informs none of it because everything is so fluid. I can’t tell you about something I wrote about six months ago because it means something different today. That’s the nature of music.”

• Politically, Rossdale feels that the times “definitely called for a shakeup.” But he hopes that includes people being more involved in the process, whatever country they’re in, beyond only election cycles. “We have the elections and people get really political and work to get votes out, and then they go back to their lives,” he says. “But I think since (Trump’s election) there’s more of a sustained interest because everybody loves their country so much and they’re like, ‘What’s happening?’ It feels like it’s in its early stages, but I’m all for people standing up and challenging what’s going on and being vigilant more than once every four years or whatever.”

• “Black And White Rainbows” is the first album Rossdale produced himself, which he says was a new adventure after working previously with producers such as Nick Raskulinecz, Jay Baumgardner and Bob Rock “Whenever I work with Bob, who you know I’ve worked with a lot and who I deeply respect and love, I always say the difference between me and him is he’s always trying to put stuff in and I’m trying to take stuff out,” Rossdale explains. “So it’s like, having no one around when I wanted to take stuff out, it just stayed out. He’d say, ‘Nothing’s changing.’ I’d say, ‘The words are changing!’ (laughs) It was interesting.”

• On tour this year Rossdale says he wants to take advantage of having seven albums to draw from for setlists. “I want to be as adventurous as possible,” Rossdale says. “I want to play loads of the new record — though not to the point where people are like ‘Not the new record only!’ -- but enough of the new record and then songs that we haven’t played. There’s obviously a certain core of songs we always feel we should play, but there’s so many hidden songs that we haven’t played that I’m really excited about. So I think we’ll really be mixing things up.”

• This year marks 25 years since Rossdale founded Bush in London, though only he and drummer Robin Goodridge remain from the original lineup. These days Rossdale says he tries to balance the band more with life outside music, particularly fatherhood. “I love making music, still, but I also have a family and am focused on how good of a father can I be?” Rossdale explains. “So if I’m going to be away from (his sons) and playing these shows, I need to make them the greatest shows ever. So everything now is so extreme, but really simple. I’m just focused on making things as great as they can be and appreciate the opportunities I have to keep doing this.”